Back to the nearest memories of humankind, 1980, when the fatuous figures of Reagan and Madame Thatcher were stalking the globe as twin pestilences, Hordes of the Things made it’s first appearance on Radio Four ( BBC ). The links should be read after listening, since they naturally are spoilers. Radio, apart from it’s life-preserving, as in rescue, or life-destroying, as in war, — though British military radio from the late Balkan Wars to Iraq in the form of the aging Clansman system was wretched enough for the soldiery to opt for using their mobiles instead if possible — services has little to commend it’s survival now; yet for the prior half of the 20th century it was more important for popular cultural enrichment than TV as a later phenomenon: fortunately, both are being obviated by the internet. Still, radio humour — as variable in quality as any other medium ( viz: mostly crap ) — supplied a need in those less advanced years; and Hordes of the Things was fairly good. However rarely repeated, the combination of actors well-known in their day, and seasoned comedic writers produced from four short episodes phrases that live in the mind. The occasional mock-shakespearian rhapsody and the underlying menace of beauty from Wagner’s finest didn’t hurt a Tolkienesque burlesque with Dragons, Eagles and Spiders. Still, ‘We are trained to be patient in the Brotherhood of Night.’ kind of haunts the mind even of those of us who are severely lacking in patience of any kind.
Quite other than it’s being comedy, there is a satire implicit upon the very worst and most despicable Liberal. The utterly sincere, and really morally pure, harmonising, well-meaning, honest idiot who horridly sees good in all and tries so hard to reconcile, that his weakness destroys himself and all that he is obligated to protect. Who genuinely thinks that competing cultures must be greeted with complacent self-destruction. Combining self-satisfied fellow-travelling, dumb moral relativism and a disgustingly feeble-minded belief in the value of all, and their good intentions, together with total disdain for those who prefer reality, makes them so worthless as to be more dangerous than a frank villain such as Bush or Clinton.
Still, as I was saying, though the contemporary in-jokes have reached the inevitable fate of all such trifles, many of the finely delivered lines resonate so as to be almost unforgettable [ Bearing in mind that everything is ultimately forgot here below... ]. Thanks to a friendly torrent this aged comedy is available here.; but also proffered as a downloadable zip which is recommended for home use.
FOOOOOOLLLL ! Now I can seeee yoou !
Name not that name within these walls, Master..
Loathsome Brothers !
Just a, a minute. There’s something strange here.
Majesteh ?
Why are there so many more wenches than hags in the village ?
The men had marched a long way, Majesteh.
Oh. Ah… yes… I see…
Beware, Agar, son of Yulfric; for no power on earth is granted without a price.
You take the counsel of that cannibal and sentence your own son to grisly death ?
Right, what is this ?
Just a mirror.
It looks like the All-Seeing Mirror of Ganst, whose power lies by reflecting deep into the souls of the fallen…
Reproduction.
And all these axes here, magic helms and articles of torture ?
Collector’s Items.
I don’t doubt it Yulfric, but what sortof collector ?
Depression came early this autumn. Sufficiently accounting for going AWOL; yet viewers would be correct to strongly demand a notification such as this, yet ennui waits for no man
Glancing through one of those not unamusing collections of fake-medieval detective stories, and was so struck by this beginning sentence by a Mr. Paul Harding, I fast checked the reference online, yet could not find any such thing in the work quoted.
‘I was reading Bartholomew the Englishman’s The Nature of Things in which he describes the planet Saturn as cold as ice, dark as night and malignant as Satan.’
A quick check astrological showed the ruling house of the hour i was born to be Saturn : not believing in this discipline in the least, this was previously unknown to me, it just seemed kinda inevitable…
[ Why I disbelieve may be shown, not only by the unlikelihood of vast symbols influencing our self-wrought nature, but by the interpretation given:
This astrological combination indicates a headstrong individual with a fiercely passionate nature. Your likes and dislikes are intense, and you tend to impose your will and taste upon others. You will rise to positions of leadership, for you display unusual courage and independence. Your nature is practical, and your goals are very much tied to matters of this world. You are stubborn in your views and you are ardently jealous of your possessions and values. Although you conduct your own affairs in semi-secrecy, you have to probe into the life of your love partner. Much about you is deep. You store away your emotions, hide your resentments, bury away knowledge. The key to a more harmonious self lies in cultivating humility and greater self-control of your one-directional, assertive personality.
Apart from the fact I can't recognise any of this; I love the sheer unsubtility of the gross flattery astrologers offer: no wonder they were so popular in braver times. And I've already got enough humility. ]
[ Possibly the first image I ever had on my first computer aons back ]
***
Neanderthal Days and Neanderthal Ways
And of Ice, I read up on Afrocentric ‘history’ just for a laugh, and came across some work by a Michael Bradley referenced, popular in the Farrakhan School, The Iceman Inheritance : Prehistoric Sources of Western Man’s Racism, Sexism and Aggression, which promulgated that white people descended partly from those crazy red-haired neanderthals, and that modern pathologies particular to western civilisations are caused by sexual dysfunction of cold neanderthal hearts — my lack of faith in psychosexual therapy, really all therapies, indicates that i am quite sure that it is as fully successful in analysis conducted at a range of 40,000 years as in the immediate present — still, I was slightly pleased, since if we are all different species rather than merely different races, then all our white ’sins’ are both natural and indeed, ineluctable.
Apparently the book proffered the additional delight that the jews are the purest form of neanderthals; amusingly referenced here in a resigned list of things certain peoples believe about the jews. Just remember that every believer is entitled to their vote under any democracy, and marvel that anyone is truly stupid enough to believe in democracy.
I took a few online sociopathy tests for fun, which results varied as wildly as astrology, although all gratifyingly scored around the higher marks. Although I can scarcely doubt being an amoral sociopath, honour and the vagaries of luck forbid the more volatile expressing of such tendencies; the trouble is that I really couldn’t care enough about people to want to kill them; even minute non-violent injury such as blowing up their empty car seems to mark being over-passionately engaged in the mundane world [ as does noticing they live, of course ], unless they offer really serious provocation, natüralich. As with all other animals, each gets individual respect, and should not be killed or injured in the slightest unless they threaten — if a bear is likely to harm one, then murdering it is justified: old lunatics like this fellow who shot a nursing bear eating birdseed really ought at least to receive enough punishment to send them to Hell. P’raps being fastened to a steering wheel and blown up with plastique as happened to the fellow in Ambler’s Send No More Roses, or something of that order ? [ Actually, I knew until fairly recently a chap who claimed to have invented plastique, or some form of it at least. Very useful stuff. ] Hopefully he would not protest unbecomingly. Being cold I always abhore unnecessary suffering: but even more the suffering inflicted by victims’ lack of pride. One of the most horrific and repulsive acts of modern cinema was the notorious, ‘Look into your heart‘ scene from Miller’s Crossing: Just kill the disgusting little fucker already…
First, tell me which breath-weapon you’d most like to control:
Lightning / Storms ~ ZOT! he he he he…
Okay, what size do you feel like inside ?
Size? Who cares? I’m the baddest dragon on this planet
Next, where would you prefer to live ?
Secluded mountain valleys, away from everything.
Which statement best describes how you feel about humans ?
They look funny. They talk funny. They act funny. They taste funny. And they fight like girls.
Select the sentence that best describes how you feel about other dragons:
Nah, that whole community thing isn’t for me.
And how do you view yourself as a dragon ?
I am the shadow, the mist, and the wind. My intentions are hidden and my reasons are my own.
What’s your most likely course of action if threatened ?
Just pass on by and hope they’re not dumb enough to try anything - for their sake.
Given the chance, would you use magic or spells ?
Yes (including “yeah, sure, whatever”, “because they might make pretty colors”, etc.)
How much treasure would you hoard if you could have all you wanted ?
You cross me and I’ll take what you’ve got. Otherwise, not much.
Lastly, which genre of music do you prefer ?
Classical, Marches, Instrumentals.
I turned out to be a White Dragon.
The Blackbird Whistling
Other news being that I converted to Blackbird as primary music player, if solely because I love the fat litle fellow. It works perfectly, even on Windows 2000 for which it is not designed; I had hoped to add one of these permanent links here, yet apart from being paralysed by choice of these charming images, they are transparent pngs, and may not come out well on this darker theme…
‘Like angels appearing in the sky, whales are proof of God.’
The Whales by Cynthia Rylant
Whales are supposed to live from 50 to 90 odd years, bearing in mind that they have no other predators than man — and since that is a recent phenomenon, it rather proves that for millions of years being at the top of the feeding chain with no enemies doesn’t necessitate population over-explosion as with humans — although men’s methods of slaughter cause so unbelievably violent a death it’s difficult to imagine a worse predator even in nature [ "If we can imagine a horse having two or three explosive spears stuck in its stomach and being made to pull a butcher's truck through the streets of London while it pours blood into the gutter, we shall have an idea of the method of killing." Dr. Harry Lillie ]; however, the discovery of a time-delay bomb last utilised in the 1880s in a whale murdered last year has led to suggestion that these profound creatures may live up to two centuries.
There’s nothing much that can be done to ensure whales survive — barring ceasing virtually all forms of human interaction, not limited to hunting, which could, after all, be said of most species. Up in the sky however, the silvern whales created by Graf v. Zeppelin are due a comeback. Safer than one can imagine — until the Hindenburg affair ( which might have been sabotage ), up to half a million passenger flights passed without incident with no commercial airship ever lost; something scarcely said of planes, trains and automobiles: and even of the 104 German war-ships, despite being, uh, rather unmissable targets, only four were shot down ( 12 others were lost/damaged, mostly on the ground ) — there was last year plans to invade the North Pole on behalf of the current International Polar Year, which comes around once every 50 years much like a Papal Jubilee Year, but googling doesn’t determine whether it’s actually taking place right now; whilst the New York Times details the airy conceits of M. Jean-Marie Massaud to create a 690 ft hotel in the sky. The Germans, naturally, have been quietly continuing with sight-seeing Zeppelin rides for years. They started before WWI, and after the interlude of WWII hindered such adventurism, picked it up again a decade back.
There’s a Zeppelin Museum in Zeppelinheim; yet for more immediate, if trifling, experience, I was drawn to this pretty little indoor balloon:
And more rigorously to the delightful firm of Minizepp, which will do one a much more robust affair up to 43 ft. Quite apart from the fact that this type of thing is what makes life more interesting, I can’t help germanically immediately considering a martial use. Should say, a medium-sized mini-ship, be painted dark grey and flown on a still night packed with explosive, controlled to drop and sacrifice it’s mechanical self when above the headquarters of the more despicable people; possibly terrorist thugs; or gangland thieves; or vivisectionists; or… Whaling Groups even. Expensive; cheaper than a jet-liner though.
Where, where will be the birds that sing
A hundred years to come ?
The flowers that now in beauty spring,
A hundred years to come ?
The rosy lips, the lofty brow,
The heart that beats so gayly now.
Oh, where will be love’s beaming eye,
Joy’s pleasant smile, and sorrow’s sigh,
A hundred years to come ?
Who’ll press for gold this crowded street,
A hundred years to come ?
Who’ll tread yon church with willing feet
A hundred years to come ?
Pale, trembling age. and fiery youth,
And childhood with its brow of truth;
The rich and poor, on land and sea.
Where will the mighty millions be
A hundred years to come ?
We all within our graves shall sleep
A hundred years to come;
No living soul for us will weep,
A hundred years to come,
But other men our lands shall till,
And others then these streets will fill,
And other birds will sing as gay,
And bright the sun shine as to-day,
A hundred years to come.
In the year 1598 AD, Portuguese sailors landing on the shores of the island of Mauritius discovered a previously unknown species of bird, the Dodo. Having been isolated by its island location from contact with humanity, the dodo greeted the new visitors with a child-like innocence. The sailors mistook the gentle spirit of the dodo, and its lack of fear of the new predators, as stupidity.
Sculpture by Gustav Gonne
About 1638, as I walked London streets, I saw the picture of a strange fowle hung out upon a clothe and myselfe with one or two more then in company went in to see it. It was kept in a chamber, and was a great fowle somewhat bigger than the largest Turky Cock, and so legged and footed, but stouter and thicker and of a more erect shape, coloured before like the breast of a young cock fesan, and on the back of dunn or dearc colour. The keeper called it a Dodo, and in the ende of a chymney in the chamber there lay a heape of large pebble stones, whereof hee gave it many in our sight, some as big as nutmegs and the keeper told us that she eats them ( conducing to digestion ), and though I remember not how far the keeper was questioned therein, yet I am confident that afterwards shee cast them all again.
Sir Hamon L’Estrange
[ A normal royalist who wrote a life of the Great King, and father of Roger, an extreme royalist journalist who battled against usurping filth in youth and age; and even gave the Dr. Goebbels of the Commonwealth, the depraved Johnny Milton a metaphorical drubbing. Goebbels without the charm, of course; for he was as inferior to the good doctor as his unspeakable master was to his tedious disciple Adolf. ]
It is near dusk in The Hague and the light is that of Frans Hals, of Rembrandt. The Dutch royal family and their guests eat and talk quietly in the great dining hall. Guards with halberds and pikes stand in the corners of the room. The family is arranged around the table; the King, Queen, some princesses, a prince, a couple of other children, and invited noble or two. Servants come out with plates and cups but they do not intrude. On a raised platform at one end of the room an orchestra plays dinner music—a harpsichord, viola, cello, three violins, and woodwinds. One of the royal dwarfs sits on the edge of the platform, his foot slowly rubbing the back of one of the dogs sleeping near him. As the music of Pachelbel’s Canon in D swells and rolls through the hall, one of the dodos walks in clumsily, stops, tilts its head, its eyes bright as a pool of tar. It sways a little, lifts its foot tentatively, one then another, rocks back and forth in time to the cello. The violins swirl. The dodo begins to dance, its great ungainly body now graceful. It is joined by the other two dodos who come into the hall, all three in sort of a circle. The harpsichord begins its counterpoint. The fourth dodo, the white one from Réunion, comes from its place under the table and joins the circle with the others. It is most graceful of all, making complete turns where the others only sway and dip on the edge of the circle they have formed. The music rises in volume; the first violinist sees the dodos and nods to the King. But he and the others at the table have already seen. They are silent, transfixed—even the servants stand still, bowls, pots and, kettles in their hands forgotten. Around the dodos dance with bobs and weaves of their ugly heads. The white dodo dips, takes half a step, pirouettes on one foot, circles again. Without a word the King of Holland takes the hand of the Queen, and they come around the table, children before the spectacle. They join in the dance, waltzing ( anachronism ) among the dodos while the family, the guests, the soldiers watch and nod in time with the music.
Howard Waldrop’s most famous story: The Ugly Chickens; which can be found here. In a most irritating layout.
“Let us mention the Dodo whose body is big and round. His corpulence gives it a slow and lazy walk. There are some nearing 50 pounds in weight. Its sight is of more interest than its taste and he looks melancholic as if he was sorry that Nature had given him such small wings for so big a body. Some have their head capped with a dark down, some had the top of their head bald and whitish as if it had been washed.They have a long and curved bill with the nostrils openings half way to the tip. It is greenish yellow. Their eyes are round and shiny and they have a fluffy plumage. Their tail looks like the sparsely beard of a Chinese made up of three or four short feathers. Their feet are thick and black and their toes powerful. They have a fiery stomach allowing them to digest stones like ostriches do”
A Dodo Blog; the Dodohaus; some 1850 notes here; a newspaper article here, and a creationist view there. Which last ends rather correctly:
Now that the bird has been extensively studied, we realize that the facts do not support the evolutionary myth, but do support the moral bankruptcy of humankind.
Yes.
Roelandt Savery - Dodo
The sentimental view of animals, that they are created for our purpose, and the mechanistic view that we are all animals and thus anything we do to them is merely one species outsmarting another come together in self-loving smug congratulation to justify any atrocity. As is only commonplace. It’s fairly difficult for most people to realise that, as with humans, animals are by no means equal, yet are each an individual: and as individual souls they get from God an individual respect which we need to emulate to act correctly. As difficult as it is for the birds of the air and beasts of the land to remember the most important thing when they see a human: Run like Hell.
“UNDER the roots of the roses,
Down in the dark, rich mould,
The dust of my dear one reposes
Like a spark which night incloses
When the ashes of day are cold.”
“Under the awful wings
Which brood over land and sea,
And whose shadows nor lift nor flee, —
This is the order of things,
And hath been from of old:
First production,
And last destruction;
So the pendulum swings,
While cradles are rocked and bells are tolled.”
“Not under the roots of the roses,
But under the luminous wings
Of the King of kings
The soul of my love reposes,
With the light of morn in her eyes,
Where the Vision of Life discloses
Life that sleeps not nor dies.”
“Under or over the skies
What is it that never dies ?
Spirit — if such there be —
Whom no one hath seen nor heard,
We do not acknowledge thee;
For, spoken or written word,
Thou art but a dream, a breath;
Certain is nothing but Death !”
Gorky was devoted to reason, knowledge and science. He wrote bitterly of the impotence of reason in the old church-dominated Russia, of the “dark abyss” and the “elegiac submissiveness to fate”. What initially alienated him from Lenin’s regime was the conviction that it was suppressing the light of reason and perpetuating in a new form the dark abyss. For Rolland, the authentic esprit was above all a rational one. Shaw, like the Webbs and like the Welsh Utopian socialist Robert Owen, whom the Fabians had latterly discovered as an intellectual ancestor, was a fierce rationalist. Like Owen, the Fabians condemned ignorance, waste, dislocation, booms, slumps and unemployment as essentially irrational. Was racism, Needham asked, anything but irrational ? Was not the Soviet Union the most determined opponent of racism ? “The subjective and irrational are anti-democratic, they are the instruments of tyranny.” Georges Friedmann described the Soviet Union as “the most magnificent effort towards the rational transformation of institutions .. . that humanity has ever attempted”. So here “reason” becomes simultaneously a system of logic or cerebration immaculately synthesized with a set of moral values. No one voiced the liberating claims of reason more fervently or consistently than Heinrich Mann with his perennial argument that the greatest weapon of the Geist in its struggle with arbitrary power was reason ( Vernunft ): indeed he published in 1923 a collection of essays collectively titled Diktatur der Vernunft. In 1937 he wrote of the USSR: “At last a state undertakes to make out of men what we have always wanted: a rational existence, the collective working for the benefit of each individual, and out of that individual shall something higher and better develop within a totality that further predicts itself.” But here rationality is interpreted as a common heritage not a class monopoly, as a matter of Geist not of Macht: he spoke of the “deep, fundamental intellectuality of the Revolution” and he pleaded that it was “in the last resort no rebellion of some against others. Basically it asks for and receives the agreement of all.” This was indeed the dream of the Enlightenment. Mann’s friend Feuchtwanger continued to regard reason as the preserve of an enlightened minority, a treasure destined to be distributed to the populace at large but so far withheld from them in all countries except the Soviet Union. “I sympathized inevitably with the experiment of basing the construction of a gigantic State on reason alone… .” He stressed the ethical “Vernunftmassigkeit” of the Plans, and later he wrote of his belief in “a slow, slow yet sure growth of human reason between the last ice-age and the next”. Similarly, “reason-through-knowledge” was the formula recommended by the Webbs and finally identified by them as operational in Russia. They were convinced that under socialism the problem of who gives orders to whom would progressively diminish since the combination of what they called “measurement with publicity” and the “searchlight of public knowledge” would burn out unreason, ignorance and apathy among the public, freeing it from its false dependence on traditional or arbitrary power. This had also been Saint-Simon’s belief.
It is of course easy to criticize the philosophical naivety of the fellow-travellers. Too blandly did they incorporate subjective, ethical premises into the general concept of reason, and in this respect they were little in advance of Thomas Paine, who described history as a periodically interrupted progress from the government of priests and conquerors to the government of pure reason - this reason being defined simply as the antithesis of ignorance. When Owen declared: “Train any population rationally, and they will be rational”, he virtually spoke for a later generation separated from him by a hundred years. Yet what sounded enlightened in 1830 could only be judged as naive in 1930. When Condorcet and Owen argued that idleness, poverty, crime and punishment were merely, in Owen’s words, “the necessary consequences of ignorance”, they could not reasonably be criticized for lacking a concept of alienation or anomie, whereas the fellow-travellers turned their backs not only on such concepts but blandly ignored a century of psychological inquiry. It was time to recognize that formulas such as Bentham’s “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” had an ethical rather than a rational basis, yet the fellow-travellers continued to elect Unitary Reason to the throne once occupied by God, complete with all the court ritual of the fall, redemption and salvation. One can at least partially sympathize with Marx’s scorn for the endeavours of Saint-Simon and Owen to convert humanity, including the rich and powerful, to socialism by means of rational persuasion; it was this aspect of their thought rather than the building of model settlements like New Harmony which provoked him to brand them as “Utopians”. Admittedly the later fellow-travellers occasionally acknowledged that the knout had become a frequent messenger of reason in Soviet Russia, but they refused to draw conclusions about the motivation of the knout-wielders, preferring to judge them as benevolent schoolmasters occasionally resorting to sterner discipline out of love for their pupils. Though they were anti-capitalist, and though some of them, like Shaw, recognized the necessity of force, the fellow-travellers still inhabited the mental universe of Auguste Comte, with his vision of history as being synonymous with the progress of the human mind towards the final, rational stage of universal positivism. No doubt the immense upheaval which took place in Russia during forced collectivization was in a sense positivistically inspired; but what appears ruthlessly rational is not necessarily reasonable, and the fellow-travellers lacked not only Kant’s insight into the necessity of an inner, moral revolution within men but also the vital gleam of cautionary wisdom offered by Voltaire when he remarked: “Le monde avec lenteur marche vers la sagesse.”
David Caute : The Fellow-Travellers
One of the finest books ever written; and by a leftist, too…
This suggests the fascinating possibility that the key for a group intending to turn Europeans against themselves is to trigger their strong tendency toward altruistic punishment by convincing them of the moral blameworthiness of their own people. Because Europeans are individualists at heart, they readily rise up in moral anger against their own people once they are seen as free riders and therefore morally blameworthy — a manifestation of their stronger tendency toward altruistic punishment deriving from their evolutionary past as hunter gatherers. In making judgments of altruistic punishment, relative genetic distance is irrelevant. Free-riders are seen as strangers in a market situation; i.e., they have no familial or tribal connection with the altruistic punisher.
As a very interesting and influential European group, the Puritans exemplified this tendency toward altruistic punishment. A defining feature of Puritanism was the tendency to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues — their susceptibility to utopian appeals to a ‘higher law’ and the belief that government’s principal purpose is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms’.” There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate — inspired by the devil. Puritan moral intensity can also be seen in their “profound personal piety” — their intensity of commitment to live not only a holy life, but also a sober and industrious life.
Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own genetic cousins. The suggestion is that this is a form of altruistic punishment found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups based on extended kinship. For example, whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired the rhetoric and rendered the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa justifiable in the minds of Puritans. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy rendered the heaviest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. Puritan moral fervor and its tendency to justify draconian punishment of evil doers can also be seen in the comments of “the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York [who] went so far as to call for ‘exterminating the German people . . . the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman,.”
Thus the current altruistic punishment so characteristic of contemporary Western civilization: Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic — violations of communal norms by free riders are punished by altruistic aggression.
Guilt is rather necessary, for we ought to know what we are; but it is also necessary to discard it as mere vainglorious self-obsession once past fault is recognised and subsumed. Natürlich, some of us find it easier than others; but that’s just through rigorous self-training ( or something ) — which is far less complacent than the opposite urge to purge another’s guilt. And certainly beats killing or self-killing to satisfy a ridiculous moral ego…
Hi Miss Alice.
With glass eyes
What kind of a dream
Are you able to have ?
Are you entranced by ?
Again for me
My heart tears apart
And flows out
Memories
Pierce into
The mended crevice
Hi Miss Alice.
With a fruitful mouth
To whom are you
Throwing love at ?
Grieving love at ?
I’m already
Spinning words
The warmth of my tongue
Completely cools
And I can’t sing
The song that I adore
i rock, i cage, i tomb, i Hell mouth.
i tomb of Guido, i tomb of Dido, i bedstead.
viii lances, i pair of stairs for Phæton.
ii steeples, & i chrime of bells, & i beacon.
i heifer for the play of Phæton, the limbs dead.
i globe, & i golden sceptre; iii clubs.
ii marchpanes, & the City of Rome.
i golden fleece; ii rackets; i bay tree.
i wooden hatchet; i leather hatchet.
i wooden canopy; old Mahomet’s head.
i lion skin; i bear’s skin; & Phæton’s limbs & Phæton’s chariot; & Argus’ head.
Neptune’s fork and garland.
i ‘crosers’ staff; Kent’s wooden leg.
Iris head, & rainbow; i little altar.
viii vizards; Tamberlain’s bridle; i wooden mattock.
Cupid’s bow, & quiver; the cloth of the sun & moon.
i boar’s head & Cerberus’ iii heads.
i Caduceus; ii moss banks, & i snake.
ii fanes of feathers; Bellendon stable; i tree of golden apples; Tantalus’ tree, ix iron targets.
i copper target, & xvii foils.
iiii wooden targets; i greeve armour.
i sign for Mother Redcap; i buckler.
Mercury’s wings; Tasso’s picture; i helmet with a dragon; i shield, with iii lions; i elm bowl.
i chain of dragons; i gilt spear.
ii coffins; i bull’s head; and i ‘vylter.’
iii timbrels; i dragon in Faustus.
i lion; ii lion heads; i great horse with his legs; i sackbut.
i wheel and frame in the Siege of London.
i pair of wrought gloves.
i Pope’s mitre.
iii Imperial crowns; i plain crown.
i ghost’s crown; i crown with a sun.
i frame for the heading in Black Joan.
i black dog.
i cauldron for the Jew.
Complete Inventory of the Properties of The Admiral’s Men, 1598.
Fair is my love, but not so fair as fickle;
Mild as a dove, but neither true nor trusty;
Brighter than glass, and yet, as glass is, brittle;
Softer than wax, and yet, as iron, rusty:
A lily pale, with damask die to grace her,
None fairer, nor none falser to deface her.
Her lips to mine how often hath she join’d,
Between each kiss her oaths of true love swearing!
How many tales to please me hath she coin’d,
Dreading my love, the loss thereof still fearing !
Yet in the midst of all her pure protestings,
Her faith, her oaths, her tears, and all were jestings.
She burn’d with love, as straw with fire flameth;
She burn’d out love, as soon as straw outburneth;
She fram’d the love, and yet she foil’d the framing;
She bade love last, and yet she fell a turning.
Was this a lover, or a lecher whether ?
Bad in the best, though excellent in neither.
“What is life ? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot
By now Americans via Roosevelt II are blamed for both Pearl Habor and Jap internment camps as if horrors right up at the top of the genocide contest; Pilgrim Fathers and white invaders of America are blamed for being immigrants [ in order to defend further unfettered life-changing immigration into the USA now, in a retarded mislogic ] and their successors blamed for having an empire now — economic and military ruling through satrapies rather than direct rule.
Now, these are some people i severely despise: liberal, and puritan, and homo americanus alike, but… they were doing what they would do; they were acting fairly correctly: you have to do various unpleasant things in war; all land grabbing is founded on Wordsworth’s Good Old Rule * — we are all the sons of slaughter — and at certain stages in a country’s life it will become an empire — if it is lucky…
FDR’S possible sin over allegedly permitting Pearl Harbor was venial compared to the Japanese assaults on humanity during WWII ( i am not blaming the Japanese for making war here ), although incorrect as regards care for his own people: yet even there, after all, a president does not have the mutual obligation of a King to his subjects and should not be held to any high account; as for the nisei camps, they were paralleled by the nazi internment of jewish people as potential traitors ( and in that case worse as an economic slave-force ), but not comparable, although again the same republican defence can be made of the fuhrer: basically, there is no way Americans then could have been expected not to consider that Japanese-Americans would not all automatically refrain from acts meant to aid Japan; if the Americans committed their fair share of war-crimes as usual, they weren’t as unpleasant occupiers as were the Japanese Imperial Army, and an easily panicked populace naturally did not want to experience the latter — a repeat of Nanking in San Francisco or Los Angeles seemed a possibility at the time. Maybe the taking of the continent, and relentless expansion of population by the invaders, was rough on American Indians, but face it: they would not be any better off if the Japanese had invaded in the 16th century instead. And had during the first two centuries of post-columbian America the natives driven the invaders back into the sea they certainly would not be now bemoaning their ancestors’ past brutalities and indulging in despicable self-guilt.
One of the troubles with the previous native occupation of the land is that the Native American Indian was an appallingly bad custodian of Mother Earth and had no respect for Nature. He destroyed animal life wantonly and without care for any future: wiping out entire species as efficiently as modern man manages with the far superior tools we have presently **, and set forests ablaze, incinerating the inhabitants, merely to attract meat-bearing animals to the ashy remainder. From the destruction of birds and animals in pre-California researched by Jack M. Broughton, “Depending on when and where you look back in time, native peoples were either living in harmony with nature or eating their way through a vast array of large-sized, attractive prey species.” Early California: A Killing Field, to modern-day reservations with uncontrolled hunting rights, “Over the past 25 years Shoshones and Arapahoes, equipped with snowmobiles, ATV’s and high-powered rifles, have virtually wiped out elk, deer, moose and bighorns on the 2.2 million-acre Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Repeated motions for modest self-regulation emanating from within the reservation have been defeated by vote of the tribal leaders…. [I]n one confined area 31 dead elk were found. In another, a retired Indian game warden mowed down an entire herd of 14. Meat piled up at local dumps. Antlers were exported to the Orient where antlers and horns are ground to a power and hawked as an aphrodisiac.” Dances with Myths, the record of wasteful slaughter is as grim as Chinese bodycounts.
The whites finished the job of destroying the buffalo of course — ironically in order as primary purpose to destroy the life and freedoms of the Indians who had massacred the buffalo so much — yet if the mass executions by rifle were hideous, the previous methods were still more vile; particularly the Bison Jumps scattered throughout the continent. A favorite buffalo hunting technique was to stampede huge herds of them over cliffs. Many such Buffalo jump sites have been found in the West, some with remains of as many as 300,000 buffalo. The technique is detailed here.
From wiki, here is one little fellow galloping through the rare art of Eadweard Muybridge: watch him go !
en sequentia…
Hungarian Bison mixing it [ or perhaps Aurochs ? ]
* “The creatures see of flood and field,
And those that travel on the wind !
With them no strife can last; they live
In peace, and peace of mind.”
“For why ? — because the good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
That they should take, who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”
William Wordsworth : Rob Roy’s Grave
** Investigations into the fossil record and carbon dating techniques have shown that 80% of the North American animal population disappeared within 1000 years of the arrival of man.
A wind comes from the north
Blowing little flocks of birds
Like spray across the town,
And a train, roaring forth,
Rushes stampeding down
With cries and flying curds
Of steam, out of the darkening north.
Whither I turn and set
Like a needle steadfastly,
Waiting ever to get
The news that she is free;
But ever fixed, as yet,
To the lode of her agony.
A month ago one of my three cats, Shelly, aged around six, was poisoned either purposefully — although that is dubious — or accidentally. After a stay at the vets she recovered; then went out on a spree and I saw her only at odd meals. Last week she came in limping and this developed into a full neurological disorder: perhaps a virus released by the earlier sickness, or toxoplasmosis — it remains unresolved; but the vets felt she could be released home on Monday. By then, though, she was immobile on a glucose drip and unable to eat, despite having lost weight. The next morning she had a seizure and, despite the light in her eyes, there was no prospect of recovery. I held her paw as the vet released an overdose that ceased her heart. Fortunately this lasted only a minute or so without distress: and… hopefully without foreknowledge of this betrayal.
It is an axiom that every American born has a chance of becoming president, yet few avail themselves of that option. Such a fairytale there to sooth the slumbering never to be acknowledged fact that 99.9% of them are subjugated by a — semi — elected ruling class and have no chance whatsoever of effecting change within the system — which is no doubt all for the best — takes no account of the fact that the odds are of course far lesser than any state lottery, which are usually stupendously unlikely. There are over 300 million Americans at present, barring any major event taking place overnight; there will be around 400 - 440 million in 2050 — although this is probably an underestimate if the present rate of legal immigration of 1 million a year was raised to to 3 or 5 million, as this 2006 legislation indicated, and illegal immigration rose dramatically for some reason [ such as some countries becoming less endurable through nature or war ]. There is the natural probability that these masses will reduce the numbers through attrition: over-crowding will increase the national propensity of Americans to kill each other at random. Anyhow, whilst strictly disinclined to search for the answer, even if it is known, I’ll assume that the total number of citizens who lived during the 20th century was, say, 400 million [ 76 million in 1900 to 281 million in 2000 --- during which time millions died and were replaced ]. During that century, 1901 to 2001, there were 18 presidents.
Even odder than that fact, from a european view, is the fact that out of all those millions, most admittedly disbarred by reasons of eligibility, disinclination, sex, mental impairment etc., even the early preliminary hat-throwing stages of a presidential race only appear to encompass around twenty to fifty persons seriously considered; and after the winnowing out by press and parties, the fix is in place and the permissible candidates are ready to run. Which means only around four Americans are ever papabile out of 300 million people. It might be slightly preferable if the final ballot was to be of a choice of twenty persons with some kind of transferable vote system to knock them down till there’s just one man standing. This wouldn’t make the system legitimate of course, but then no system which includes people voting can confer legitimacy on any result.
As a graceful tribute to that dead-eyed political process here are some songs for each participant. Unattributed generic Corries-type band for the first, but I couldn’t find the inimitable original from Francie & Josie; Alice Blue Gown no doubt since the song was inspired by the daughter of another great family of presidential nepotists — although scarcely so semi-insanely so as poor old Hil with her almost unique sense of unaccountable entitlement; Red Yo-Yo as pace McCain, Iran will resemble how we kept the Gorbals over here [ a ben trovato tale goes of after perhaps the Somme or Ypres an over-excitable senior staff officer burst into tears when taken to view the mud, deeper mud than anyone can really imagine, and exclaimed "My God, did we send men to die in that ?!" --- Yes we did sir, and nor all your tears shall wash out a word of it... Still, another point is that even in piping days of peace we really didn't provide very well for our poor... 'Did we keep people in places like these ?' Matt McGinn was a commie, and looking at Glasgow then, one can understand why. Naturally, having faith in the working-class is as vulgar and debased as faith in an aristocracy, or faith in wealthy businessmen, yet people had to believe in something I guess. ]
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
